Noise reduction for screen content coding based on local histogram

This paper proposes a noise reduction method for screen content coding using HEVC. The proposed method focuses on that the histograms of pixel values for screen content have distinct and sparse peaks respectively. This property is often degraded by the coding distortion, which arises some small peaks around the original peak. This paper presents a method for removing the small peaks derived from the noise, and its implementation to HEVC as an extension of SAO. Experimental evaluation shows that the proposed noise reduction method significantly improves the visual quality of decoded screen content with bit-rate reduction.